New Composers and Old

Programming contemporary works with standard repertoire seems tricky: The danger is that the new, unfamiliar piece might easily sound like commentary on the towering masterwork. (Imagine if a writer were forced to publish a novel as a foreword to Joyce’s Ulysses.) But Monday night, as the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble presented three string quartets at the Green Room of the War Memorial Veterans Building, the two living composers, Karl Kohn and Lei Liang, chose to create their own contexts. The dead one, a fellow by the name of Ludwig van Beethoven, was left to fend for himself, and of course did a fine job of it. Kohn and Liang were in attendance for the superb renditions of their works in the concert's first half. Beethoven was of course present only in spirit, his String Quartet in F Major, Op. 135, completing the evening.

Kohn framed his Three Pieces for String Quartet by including program notes about his musical heritage, citing the First and Second Viennese Schools and post-World War II serialism. (Beethoven was absent.) The music seemed to be constantly looking into the past: for example, rich, weighty contrapuntal textures evoking Schoenberg that worked in the ever-ringing acoustical well of the Green Room. On top of this was an ever-present lyricism that evinced a deep regard for Schubert in the distant past, and possibly Roger Sessions in a more recent one. The first movement possessed a solemn character, with an expansive developmental trajectory. In the second movement, as more voices from the past entered the fold, the texture became more volatile and unpredictable. But throughout the quartet, the sense of forward propulsion was never lost — there remained a consistent treatment of harmony that held the three movements together. Kohn wrote in the program notes that he sometimes parodies music from the past, but if that happened in this quartet, it was well-hidden and integrated into his own musical rhetoric.

Fragments From Mongolia

Lei Liang spoke briefly before the performance of his piece, Serashi Fragments. He discussed his background; most noteworthy was that he has championed and preserved the music of Serashi, a Mongolian folk musician who died in 1968. In a way, Liang’s piece began with this spoken preface, and it reminded me of Luciano Chessa’s recital a few weeks ago in which the audience watched the composer “at work” before the performance officially began. Liang’s enthusiasm for Serashi as a musical and cultural figure made it apparent that the music was much more for him than simply source material from a folk tradition. As a result, the section of the piece most reminiscent of Serashi’s music carried with it an additional layer of meaning. The outer sections that contrasted this soulful moment featured bursts of activity, as if Liang were deconstructing the fiddling style itself — breaking it up into its constituent parts of sharp attacks, noisy overbowing, carefully controlled harmonics, short glissandos, and silence. I was most taken when the fragments finally coalesced into more continuous music, but the overall form was always clear and convincing. The performance of Op. 135 rounded out the concert. Most memorable was the ensemble’s careful treatment of the introduction in the last movement. Kurt Rohde and Leighton Fong locked in on the low end, with the viola and cello laying the motivic groundwork for a sublime reading of the recitative that skirts so effortlessly between explicit program and spellbinding enigma. The group chose a clear phrasing pattern that lent the movement a smooth, speechlike quality. Here I felt the players provided a fitting context to the entire work by allowing those famous words Beethoven wrote into the manuscript to be sung, rather than merely emphasize a link between rhythmic patterns of the music and syllables of the text: (“Muss es sein? Es muss sein! Es muss sein!” Must it be? It must be! It must be!). This may explain why I didn’t find myself pondering the usual questions concerning the "anxiety of influence" that accompanies so many performances of Beethoven’s late works (as well as the living composers who dare share the billing). Rather than towering over the other pieces, the Op. 135 moved in a unique direction, with the players considering the implications of their musical presentation with just as much care as the composers of the concert had.